Chronic rhinosinusitis is a common disorder which may affect up to 13% of the US population. Chronic rhinosinusitis affects numerous quality-of-life factors including sense of smell, ability to sleep and ability to communicate. One common treatment for medical refractory chronic rhinosinusitis is functional endoscopic sinus surgery. As the disease course is indolent, yet prolonged, some medical treatment guidelines suggest use of an antibiotic treatment, prescribed following appropriately obtained nasal cultures, which treatment can last weeks with or without an adjunctive topical or oral steroid treatment. While effective in many cases, there are failures with functional endoscopic sinus surgery which, as described in the art, can be as high as 2-24 percent. It has been suggested that functional endoscopic sinus surgery may offer little, if any, greater benefit than medical management.
Furthermore, ineffective functional endoscopic sinus surgery may lead to the emergence of a new flora of pathogens. In one case, the bacterial flora in chronic rhinosinusitis comprises coagulase-negative Staphylococci as the most common of the organisms identifiable isolates, followed by Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus viridans, Corynebacterium, and anaerobes. Patients not relieved by primary functional endoscopic sinus surgery can demonstrate a significant rise in Pseudomonas and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus positive cultures. Moreover patients with Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa positive cultures may be associated with an unfavorable evolution after surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis.
United States Patent Application No. 2005/0107853 to Krespi et al. describes various methods and apparatus for broad-spectrum treatments of chronic rhinosinusitis with various electromagnetic radiative energy including visible, and optionally, thermal RF, microwave or other longer energy wavelengths.
The foregoing description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together of disclosures, that were not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but which were provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may have been specifically pointed out herein, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context. Merely because a document may have been cited here, no admission is made that the field of the document, which may be quite different from that of the invention, is analogous to the field or fields of the present invention.